5 ms·

Microslop Manifesto

220 points by gostsamo 8mo ago

api 8mo ago
The AI backlash is interesting to watch. It’s both right and wrong. It’s right that slop is real and a lot of present AI is crap, and it’s right about the risks to employment and the economy. But when it comes to the first, it’s wrong that this won’t get better. AI is advancing rapidly. When it comes to economics, AI is just bringing to a head long standing fundamental problems with wealth distribution and fairness that have been building for a long time. AI might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but the camel isn’t looking so hot. Before AI hit big we already had two generations priced out of housing. The story on journalism and public discourse is, I think, similar. AI might be the last nail in that coffin but the coffin was already closed and the man was already dead. Social media algorithms and man-made disinformation killed public discourse more than a decade ago. Any solution to those problems should also help the slop problem. My point is that all these problems were nearing crisis level without AI and would still demand solutions without AI. AI might actually help by making them no longer possible to ignore. Meanwhile all this criticism totally ignores what AI will make possible and is already making possible. Typical human negativity bias.
- orwin 8mo ago
  I think text/code genAI still have space to grow, but it's the same space fixed image generation models had two years ago. The usage grew, the costs diminished, the accuracy slightly increased, but the weirdness will stay, and gross mistakes are still there, at a similar rate.
  - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
    This is not true in the slightest. Accuracy and weirdness are clearly getting better and better for both images, ai and articles. Remember will smith rating spaghetti? If you ignore the trend line then that is utter blindness. That being said you can make an argument that AI will flatline in the future. But your evidence for that does not lie in past progress as the past shows a trend line that is clearly upwards.
    - orwin 8mo ago
      I said accuracy was sightly better . The improvement isn't that high though, not enough for me to update my images. Weirdness is still there (when you want photorealism), and i think the rate of gross mistakes (at least for stablediffusion) is around the same ~ one in ten, since at least a year (i don't remember what i generated in 2024, but i think it was around the same too). And it still can't get historical generation right. I haven't seen once accurate clothing and architecture when you want to go historical scenes. It's great for fantasy though, which is my main usage, so i didn't wrote about it, but it definitely something that hasn't improved at all. If you want to argue its sightly less weird, i can listen to it (i think it's more desensitization more than anything, but you can have arguments). If you think the rate of gross mistake went from 1/10 to 1/12, maybe you're right and i'm too negative. But historical mistakes in scenes just never change, it is still extremely wrong.
      - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
        https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1pe630n/will_smith_eating_spaghetti_29_years_later/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1pe630n/will_smith... Again the trend line is clearly up.
        orwin 8mo ago
        Fixed images. As in static images. Of course i'm not talking about Sora or videos. I was talking about static images. Stablediffusion and other image generation peaked after two years. My original point was that static images peaked in 2024 and improvement have been minimal since then. "fixed images".
- fleetfox 8mo ago
  Is it really complaining about quality of AI? The dangerous part is that slop will be harder to detect.
  - rfv6723 8mo ago
    The anxiety surrounding AI-generated "slop" mirrors the frantic warnings of late 15th-century clerics who viewed the printing press as an engine of spiritual decay. Johannes Trithemius, a prominent Benedictine abbot, famously argued that monk-scribes should not abandon their pens, fearing that printed books were ephemeral, error-ridden toys that would undermine the sanctity of scripture and the discipline of the mind. He believed that the sheer volume of cheap, mechanical texts would drown out genuine wisdom and lead to a permanent decline in the quality of human thought. History shows he fundamentally misunderstood the human capacity for adaptation. Rather than succumbing to a sea of printed garbage, society developed sophisticated new filters. We invented the modern bibliography, the peer-review process, the concept of a "trusted publisher," and the critical literacy skills required to navigate a world where information was no longer a rare luxury. Humans have an innate drive to seek out signal over noise. Just as the chaos of the early printing era eventually gave way to the Enlightenment, our current struggle with synthetic content will likely trigger a new evolution in how we verify truth and value human insight.
    - sigwinch 8mo ago
      I think his legacy is about stegography and cryptography. I think he relied on handwritten volumes and couldn’t adapt his cryptographic techniques.
    - crote 8mo ago
      "Generating slop is totally fine because we'll eventually develop anti-slop filters" isn't exactly the most convincing argument, you know. Besides, your link between the "chaos of the early printing press" and the start of the Enlightenment is very forced. The Greek philosophers did plenty of critical thinking after all, and they had no need for a printing press. I see absolutely zero reason why the current AI bubble will inevitably result in an Enlightenment-like period, nor why AI would be a hard requirement for one.
- devin1 8mo ago
  the backlash presented on this site is specifically against Microsoft's AI crap. way to over-generalize
- qualityslop 8mo ago
  Yeah,,, we want QUALITY slop! And we want it NOW!
- filoeleven 8mo ago
  > Meanwhile all this criticism totally ignores what AI will make possible and is already making possible. I'm not ignoring it, I simply haven't seen compelling evidence of the hype.
- crote 8mo ago
  > it’s wrong that this won’t get better. AI is advancing rapidly. Even assuming this is true for the high-end productivity models (like Claude Code), how does this change anything about the main argument? The AI integrations which are getting forced on me in every single app aren't using those newer models: I try them every few months just-in-case and they are always complete garbage. The people generating SEO blogspam sure aren't going to pay for the fancy models either. And it's not like the herders of the AI bots vomiting comments all over social media care about quality. Unless you are an active ChatGPT / Claude / whatever subscriber, most of your day-to-day interaction with AI will always be with the cheapest slop you can imagine - and that's what the backlash is primarily against. Besides, I don't actually care whether you are stuffing dog poo or delicious tomatoes in my mailbox, I want it to stop! I never asked for it, and it's ruining all the stuff I actually want delivered to my home. Those integrations are at best as annoying as the "Chat with a sales consultant!" and "Let our site send you notifications!" popups: even if your AI were to achieve AGI, I would still want them gone.
- m0llusk 8mo ago
  There are ways to advance rapidly without causing problems for large numbers of people. LLMs are being forced everywhere and the result is a mess. Being serious about a promising new technology usually means going slow and emphasizing what tools and practices work for particular contexts. Instead we are all being told to use the latest because we will be left behind. It doesn't make sense to be slinging slop everywhere and then complain about journalism and public discourse because that is an option that was rejected.
- threethirtytwo 8mo ago
  You want to understand the backlash? Then stop looking at benchmarks and start looking at mirrors. For a certain kind of engineer, programming was never just a skill. It was the quiet proof that they were capable in a world that rarely offers certainty. You learn the syntax. You master the abstractions. You tame chaos into structure. Machines obey. Systems bend. The invisible becomes tractable. Over time, that competence hardens into identity. You are not just someone who writes code. You are someone who understands. Now imagine watching that understanding become commonplace. An autocomplete becomes a collaborator. A collaborator becomes a generator. The thing that once required years of apprenticeship begins to appear in seconds on a screen. Imperfect, yes. Crude in places. But undeniably moving. If your sense of self is braided tightly with that craft, you don’t experience this as a tool upgrade. You experience it as erosion. And the mind does what minds have always done when erosion threatens something sacred. It fortifies. It searches for certainty. It assembles a narrative strong enough to stand against the tremor. “It’s hype.” “It produces slop.” “It makes more work than it saves.” “It can’t really think.” In specific contexts, those statements are accurate. Anyone who uses these systems seriously knows their limits. But watch how quickly narrow truths are inflated into sweeping conclusions. Watch how nuance evaporates. Watch how the exceptions are framed as the rule. When identity feels endangered, skepticism becomes absolutism. This is not unique to engineers. It is not even unique to this century. Every community that binds meaning to belief has faced the same reckoning. When a worldview sustains status, belonging, and purpose, evidence alone does not dislodge it. The mind will reinterpret what it sees before it surrenders what it is. Community is preserved first. Truth negotiates for second place. On Hacker News, coding is not merely economic activity. It is status, tribe, hierarchy. It is the signal that separates builders from observers. And when the boundary blurs, when machines cross it, something deeper than workflow efficiency is unsettled. People sense the shift long before they articulate it. They feel the ground change texture beneath their feet. The language of critique becomes sharper. The confidence more brittle. The dismissals more absolute. Because what is being questioned is not only whether the tools work. It is whether the years invested in mastery will still confer distinction. There are legitimate risks. There is genuine mediocrity flooding the market. There are economic consequences that deserve sober attention. But beneath the surface of many reactions lies a quieter fear: if this continues, what makes me exceptional? That question is rarely spoken aloud. It doesn’t need to be. It hums beneath the arguments. History is unkind to identities built on exclusivity. The printing press unsettled scribes. The camera unsettled portrait painters. The spreadsheet unsettled accountants. Each time, the first instinct was to defend the old boundary. Each time, the boundary moved anyway. What we are witnessing is not the death of programming. It is the democratization of parts of it. And democratization always feels like diminishment to those who built their lives around scarcity. It is easier to call the tide fake than to admit it is rising. That does not mean the critics are fools. It means they are human. They are protecting something that once protected them. They are guarding the altar that gave them worth. But tides do not negotiate with altars. They arrive.
elcapitan 8mo ago
I get the naming from the other thread, but is any of this particularly Microsoft-specific? Google creates a mess in search and their docs as well, slop code is one the main artifact of all these AI tools, and bloat, hallucinations and the sloppification of web content is a general problem.
- sunaookami 8mo ago
  Speaking of Google Search, I absolutely hate that the AI answers push down the whole content and you constantly misclick. Not to mention these are often hilariously wrong. Trying Brave Search currently and the AI answers are way more accurate and actually don't push the content down (it's a fixed container).
- gostsamo 8mo ago
  TBH, I discovered the website by just domain checking the word. It might be that someone has been inspired by the same incident to write down their general thoughts and if not for it, the website would've been slopgularity.com.
- dm319 8mo ago
  I understand that people are fed up of it running on their operating system (and perceived poor performance of Windows 11), but yes, google/duckduckgo are all running LLM queries with every search. I have to use Windows 11 at work, it can literally take half a minute before a Win key, then, say, "ou" will find the program Outlook*. * I was also completely unable to find a keyboard shortcut for New Outlook to filter by 'Unread' without performing a search and respecting the inbox search order etc.. Turns out the filter button just above the inbox is a React component and it can't be called from the Alt - key shortcut.
- pndy 8mo ago
  It's due to both: the deranged AI push MS did in last 3 years and continuous degradation of their flagship product - Windows, for last 10. I think no other company managed to get a punny nickname due to their questionable pursuits and actions around new trends. Tho most of them were ridiculed in memes and countless critical posts on the Internet when something have surfaced. Also, it appears that Microslop was coined first in 1994, acc. to wikitionary [1] [1] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Microslop https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Microslop
CrazyStat 8mo ago
This site is extremely uncomfortable to read on mobile (iOS).
- kelvinjps10 8mo ago
  +2 android
- Jgrubb 8mo ago
  The "hide distracting items" option is the best thing Apple has done lately. Unfortunately there's not anything worth your time once you get that nav out of the way.
- znort_ 8mo ago
  it also contains no "manifesto" ... -tracker, -alert or -status would be more proper titles.
Retr0id 8mo ago
The irony is that this site is clearly vibecoded, especially the https://status.microslop.com/ https://status.microslop.com/ page, which "works" by requesting `https://outlook.office365.com/owa/healthcheck.htm https://outlook.office365.com/owa/healthcheck.htm` which is nonexistent and returns a 500 error but the code doesn't seem to detect that (and I don't think it could even if it wanted to, due to CORS).
- zouhair 8mo ago
  Isn't that the point? As if Microsoft is the one making it.
  - Retr0id 8mo ago
    If that was the point then why not mimic Microsoft's actual design?
    - giancarlostoro 8mo ago
      Isn't the design inspired by Microsoft's Windows 8 flat design?
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
      - perching_aix 8mo ago
        Would be surprised, looks nothing like it. Certainly not to my eyes anyways.
      - dominicrose 8mo ago
        IMO Windows phone design and Windows 8 Metro were too minimalistic and squared like this, but TBH the current version of Windows has nice design and you can customize the theme and other things. The issue with Windows now is the unjustified delays and bugs. I think professional PCs suffer the most from bugs because my own PC works fine. Not sure it's completely Microsoft's fault, could be the company. Sometimes the problem can also be the hardware and it's also not completely MS at fault since many manufacturers can produce PC and at widely varying prices.
belabartok39 8mo ago
Irony is that this site itself is text-book, generated slop.
leshenka 8mo ago
At least they're being honest about the counter in their source: // Starting value (high number to suggest ongoing problem) let currentCount = 8_472_000;
- gordonhart 8mo ago
  This comment was almost certainly written by an LLM.
- xnorswap 8mo ago
  I recognise Claude's voice in that when I see it.
- Lerc 8mo ago
  It has that AI referring to a point in the conversation feel about it too. This site would be a particularly interesting example to see the conversation that generated it. There was a case locally where a political party copped flack for using AI generated images of minorities implying that the people in the picture supported their policies. I didn't think the use of AI was terribly significant when it came to the output because, before AI, they would have just hired some actors for the photos and achieved much the same effect. The thing that I did think was significant was, in creating the images, they must have committed to writing exactly what it is that they wanted an image of. I really wished that journalists asked for that text, and then challenged the inevitable refusal.
  - WillAdams 8mo ago
    I believe that a lot of the problems with LLMs would be greatly ameliorated if every generated image had embedded in the metadata the prompt and by default, the user credentials (which could be turned off for folks who want privacy).
- clearleaf 8mo ago
  What am I even supposed to think "gallons of slop" means? Funny that this is both fake and meaningless. OP if you're reading this, this garbage was the worst possible way you could have made the point.
mpalmer 8mo ago
I do not care how good your point is, even satirical, noble-minded slop is a waste of our collective time and energy.
phaser 8mo ago
Is Microsoft the really the main force drowning the internet in slop? I appreciate the discussion on the subject but why is it so specific on Microsoft and the userbase of Bing? It’s funny because I wanted to register this domain for the lulz 3 months ago (Microslop is a fictional company in my videogame Microlandia) but the price was ~15k so i settled for the cheaper microslop.net Whoever wants to get the message across has certainly big motivations ;)
- giancarlostoro 8mo ago
  > Whoever wants to get the message across has certainly big motivations ;) Could be they are renting the domain instead for a fraction of the cost.
TechSquidTV 8mo ago
"Clawdbot, make me a website about how evil AI is. And make it snappy!"
wonsukchoi97 8mo ago
what's the point of this site?
- blitzar 8mo ago
  Streisand effect > Microsoft bans the word "Microslop" on its Discord, then locks the server. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216047
gary17the 8mo ago
The Microslop Manifesto hitting the front page of Hacker News and Anthropic Claude servers showing "Partial Outage" at exactly the same time - a coincidence? "I think not."
- muzani 8mo ago
  Long live the revolution
  - DonHopkins 8mo ago
    The revolution will be tokenized.
    - blitzar 8mo ago
      Finally a use for blockchain.
- dominicrose 8mo ago
  Is it a coincidence that Trump ordered government agencies not to use Anthropic?
oersted 8mo ago
The site itself it's quite the slopfest too! There's no manifesto ("manifest"??), the counter is completely fake, and the tracker doesn't show any of the user submitted reports. There's nothing here other than: "Microsoft is integrating AI into their products and I don't like it, build a website about it please". It barely even has anything to do with Microsoft, it's more of a shallow "AI is bad" take. Is this meant to be satire? It's rather in bad taste if you ask me, I have no idea how it got so many upvotes.
DonHopkins 8mo ago
Microsoft wants to be a Slopopoly, the single source of slop.
piker 8mo ago
Flagged this. As much as I also love to dunk on Microsoft, this kind of crapware is not the way to do it. [I personally] don’t want this on the front page. [And I think others should join me in that belief. Let’s try to keep it a place for interesting things that took some effort.] [edited based on feedback.]
- callamdelaney 8mo ago
  we do
  - piker 8mo ago
    Then can you take yourselves back to Reddit or something? This used to be an interesting place to visit that was differentiated from other “hot take” havens on the net.
    - fuzzfactor 8mo ago
      Well, when a good faith [0] submission from a respectable unaffiliated developer is disparaged on a place like reddit by some heavy-handed action, a natural reaction can be something like "Who died and made you bhagwan?" Now that you mention it, the similarity is more obvious than I thought. [0] OK, moderate faith, "there's an LLM involved so it's got to be crapware". Not my downvote btw, never have never will, that's almost as chickenshit as can be. Almost.
      - piker 8mo ago
        I appreciate your ethics. I do not share your views.
        fuzzfactor 8mo ago
        I appreciate effort to make this a better place, I just would rather do it with upvotes more than anything else. I don't prefer slop at all, plus people already know Microsoft has declined more in one recent year than any other, and this Microslop site is kind of a lame response, but it did draw some worthwhile comments. This is the kind of thing that has been on peoples' minds so that's what comes out. I don't think it's gostsamo promoting his own work, just something he ran across that emphasizes how bad it could get or maybe how bad it already is in some quarters. Pure slop really and it's bound to get the strongest reaction, but quite interesting when plenty of 90% slop is passing under the radar quite regularly.
mx_03 8mo ago
There was this old hispanic site called mocosoft (moco translates to booger) that was succesfully sued by Microsoft due to a very similar name. Or at least the mocosoft owener received a ceise and desist by Microsoft and decided to drop the site. I expect something similar with this site
mittermayr 8mo ago
Attention, attention, and more attention. That's what that is. First it was crypto, now it's things like this, literal slop that helps absolutely nobody, doing the very thing it claims needs to be stopped: polluting the internet. I get it, everyone wants attention, but figure out a better way, do it right. Also, "Microslop is a satirical mirror" seems like some heavy lifting on overselling the message here. People need to stop pooping in the pool, so, to bring awareness to this, I will now poop in the pool.
pancsta 8mo ago
You should unslop your scroll, whats your strategy to fix half my viewport? I’ll tell you what it is - SLOP ;)
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
rekabis 8mo ago
Personal fresh-setup first steps: • StartAllBack heavily modified for WinXP look-and-feel • Win10Privacy (yes, it handles Win11), with all Windows Store apps yoinked except for store and media utilities • Raphire/Win11Debloat • builtbybel/WinSlop That alone handles a majority of the rip-and-tear I have to do with a fresh Windows installation. Sure, there is a lot more after that, but these seem to handle at least ⅔ of all the heavy lifting. So honestly, aside from the hour or two it takes to run all of these and confirm everything has been voilently excised, AI isn’t really a high concern for me. Right now my short-term fear surrounds the OOBE blocking of local accounts on Home/Pro outside of domain usage. There are still workarounds, but who knows how long they’ll last. Currently trying to design a truly universal image that can be flashed/imaged such that any typical x64 system can at least boot into the Administrator account so that other local accounts can be made manually.

220 points by gostsamo 8mo ago

api 8mo ago

The AI backlash is interesting to watch. It’s both right and wrong. It’s right that slop is real and a lot of present AI is crap, and it’s right about the risks to employment and the economy. But when it comes to the first, it’s wrong that this won’t get better. AI is advancing rapidly. When it comes to economics, AI is just bringing to a head long standing fundamental problems with wealth distribution and fairness that have been building for a long time. AI might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but the camel isn’t looking so hot. Before AI hit big we already had two generations priced out of housing. The story on journalism and public discourse is, I think, similar. AI might be the last nail in that coffin but the coffin was already closed and the man was already dead. Social media algorithms and man-made disinformation killed public discourse more than a decade ago. Any solution to those problems should also help the slop problem. My point is that all these problems were nearing crisis level without AI and would still demand solutions without AI. AI might actually help by making them no longer possible to ignore. Meanwhile all this criticism totally ignores what AI will make possible and is already making possible. Typical human negativity bias.

orwin 8mo ago
I think text/code genAI still have space to grow, but it's the same space fixed image generation models had two years ago. The usage grew, the costs diminished, the accuracy slightly increased, but the weirdness will stay, and gross mistakes are still there, at a similar rate.
- threethirtytwo 8mo ago
  This is not true in the slightest. Accuracy and weirdness are clearly getting better and better for both images, ai and articles. Remember will smith rating spaghetti? If you ignore the trend line then that is utter blindness. That being said you can make an argument that AI will flatline in the future. But your evidence for that does not lie in past progress as the past shows a trend line that is clearly upwards.
  - orwin 8mo ago
    I said accuracy was sightly better . The improvement isn't that high though, not enough for me to update my images. Weirdness is still there (when you want photorealism), and i think the rate of gross mistakes (at least for stablediffusion) is around the same ~ one in ten, since at least a year (i don't remember what i generated in 2024, but i think it was around the same too). And it still can't get historical generation right. I haven't seen once accurate clothing and architecture when you want to go historical scenes. It's great for fantasy though, which is my main usage, so i didn't wrote about it, but it definitely something that hasn't improved at all. If you want to argue its sightly less weird, i can listen to it (i think it's more desensitization more than anything, but you can have arguments). If you think the rate of gross mistake went from 1/10 to 1/12, maybe you're right and i'm too negative. But historical mistakes in scenes just never change, it is still extremely wrong.
    - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1pe630n/will_smith_eating_spaghetti_29_years_later/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1pe630n/will_smith... Again the trend line is clearly up.
      - orwin 8mo ago
        Fixed images. As in static images. Of course i'm not talking about Sora or videos. I was talking about static images. Stablediffusion and other image generation peaked after two years. My original point was that static images peaked in 2024 and improvement have been minimal since then. "fixed images".
fleetfox 8mo ago
Is it really complaining about quality of AI? The dangerous part is that slop will be harder to detect.
- rfv6723 8mo ago
  The anxiety surrounding AI-generated "slop" mirrors the frantic warnings of late 15th-century clerics who viewed the printing press as an engine of spiritual decay. Johannes Trithemius, a prominent Benedictine abbot, famously argued that monk-scribes should not abandon their pens, fearing that printed books were ephemeral, error-ridden toys that would undermine the sanctity of scripture and the discipline of the mind. He believed that the sheer volume of cheap, mechanical texts would drown out genuine wisdom and lead to a permanent decline in the quality of human thought. History shows he fundamentally misunderstood the human capacity for adaptation. Rather than succumbing to a sea of printed garbage, society developed sophisticated new filters. We invented the modern bibliography, the peer-review process, the concept of a "trusted publisher," and the critical literacy skills required to navigate a world where information was no longer a rare luxury. Humans have an innate drive to seek out signal over noise. Just as the chaos of the early printing era eventually gave way to the Enlightenment, our current struggle with synthetic content will likely trigger a new evolution in how we verify truth and value human insight.
  - sigwinch 8mo ago
    I think his legacy is about stegography and cryptography. I think he relied on handwritten volumes and couldn’t adapt his cryptographic techniques.
  - crote 8mo ago
    "Generating slop is totally fine because we'll eventually develop anti-slop filters" isn't exactly the most convincing argument, you know. Besides, your link between the "chaos of the early printing press" and the start of the Enlightenment is very forced. The Greek philosophers did plenty of critical thinking after all, and they had no need for a printing press. I see absolutely zero reason why the current AI bubble will inevitably result in an Enlightenment-like period, nor why AI would be a hard requirement for one.
devin1 8mo ago
the backlash presented on this site is specifically against Microsoft's AI crap. way to over-generalize
qualityslop 8mo ago
Yeah,,, we want QUALITY slop! And we want it NOW!
filoeleven 8mo ago
> Meanwhile all this criticism totally ignores what AI will make possible and is already making possible. I'm not ignoring it, I simply haven't seen compelling evidence of the hype.
crote 8mo ago
> it’s wrong that this won’t get better. AI is advancing rapidly. Even assuming this is true for the high-end productivity models (like Claude Code), how does this change anything about the main argument? The AI integrations which are getting forced on me in every single app aren't using those newer models: I try them every few months just-in-case and they are always complete garbage. The people generating SEO blogspam sure aren't going to pay for the fancy models either. And it's not like the herders of the AI bots vomiting comments all over social media care about quality. Unless you are an active ChatGPT / Claude / whatever subscriber, most of your day-to-day interaction with AI will always be with the cheapest slop you can imagine - and that's what the backlash is primarily against. Besides, I don't actually care whether you are stuffing dog poo or delicious tomatoes in my mailbox, I want it to stop! I never asked for it, and it's ruining all the stuff I actually want delivered to my home. Those integrations are at best as annoying as the "Chat with a sales consultant!" and "Let our site send you notifications!" popups: even if your AI were to achieve AGI, I would still want them gone.
m0llusk 8mo ago
There are ways to advance rapidly without causing problems for large numbers of people. LLMs are being forced everywhere and the result is a mess. Being serious about a promising new technology usually means going slow and emphasizing what tools and practices work for particular contexts. Instead we are all being told to use the latest because we will be left behind. It doesn't make sense to be slinging slop everywhere and then complain about journalism and public discourse because that is an option that was rejected.
threethirtytwo 8mo ago
You want to understand the backlash? Then stop looking at benchmarks and start looking at mirrors. For a certain kind of engineer, programming was never just a skill. It was the quiet proof that they were capable in a world that rarely offers certainty. You learn the syntax. You master the abstractions. You tame chaos into structure. Machines obey. Systems bend. The invisible becomes tractable. Over time, that competence hardens into identity. You are not just someone who writes code. You are someone who understands. Now imagine watching that understanding become commonplace. An autocomplete becomes a collaborator. A collaborator becomes a generator. The thing that once required years of apprenticeship begins to appear in seconds on a screen. Imperfect, yes. Crude in places. But undeniably moving. If your sense of self is braided tightly with that craft, you don’t experience this as a tool upgrade. You experience it as erosion. And the mind does what minds have always done when erosion threatens something sacred. It fortifies. It searches for certainty. It assembles a narrative strong enough to stand against the tremor. “It’s hype.” “It produces slop.” “It makes more work than it saves.” “It can’t really think.” In specific contexts, those statements are accurate. Anyone who uses these systems seriously knows their limits. But watch how quickly narrow truths are inflated into sweeping conclusions. Watch how nuance evaporates. Watch how the exceptions are framed as the rule. When identity feels endangered, skepticism becomes absolutism. This is not unique to engineers. It is not even unique to this century. Every community that binds meaning to belief has faced the same reckoning. When a worldview sustains status, belonging, and purpose, evidence alone does not dislodge it. The mind will reinterpret what it sees before it surrenders what it is. Community is preserved first. Truth negotiates for second place. On Hacker News, coding is not merely economic activity. It is status, tribe, hierarchy. It is the signal that separates builders from observers. And when the boundary blurs, when machines cross it, something deeper than workflow efficiency is unsettled. People sense the shift long before they articulate it. They feel the ground change texture beneath their feet. The language of critique becomes sharper. The confidence more brittle. The dismissals more absolute. Because what is being questioned is not only whether the tools work. It is whether the years invested in mastery will still confer distinction. There are legitimate risks. There is genuine mediocrity flooding the market. There are economic consequences that deserve sober attention. But beneath the surface of many reactions lies a quieter fear: if this continues, what makes me exceptional? That question is rarely spoken aloud. It doesn’t need to be. It hums beneath the arguments. History is unkind to identities built on exclusivity. The printing press unsettled scribes. The camera unsettled portrait painters. The spreadsheet unsettled accountants. Each time, the first instinct was to defend the old boundary. Each time, the boundary moved anyway. What we are witnessing is not the death of programming. It is the democratization of parts of it. And democratization always feels like diminishment to those who built their lives around scarcity. It is easier to call the tide fake than to admit it is rising. That does not mean the critics are fools. It means they are human. They are protecting something that once protected them. They are guarding the altar that gave them worth. But tides do not negotiate with altars. They arrive.

elcapitan 8mo ago

I get the naming from the other thread, but is any of this particularly Microsoft-specific? Google creates a mess in search and their docs as well, slop code is one the main artifact of all these AI tools, and bloat, hallucinations and the sloppification of web content is a general problem.

sunaookami 8mo ago
Speaking of Google Search, I absolutely hate that the AI answers push down the whole content and you constantly misclick. Not to mention these are often hilariously wrong. Trying Brave Search currently and the AI answers are way more accurate and actually don't push the content down (it's a fixed container).
gostsamo 8mo ago
TBH, I discovered the website by just domain checking the word. It might be that someone has been inspired by the same incident to write down their general thoughts and if not for it, the website would've been slopgularity.com.
dm319 8mo ago
I understand that people are fed up of it running on their operating system (and perceived poor performance of Windows 11), but yes, google/duckduckgo are all running LLM queries with every search. I have to use Windows 11 at work, it can literally take half a minute before a Win key, then, say, "ou" will find the program Outlook*. * I was also completely unable to find a keyboard shortcut for New Outlook to filter by 'Unread' without performing a search and respecting the inbox search order etc.. Turns out the filter button just above the inbox is a React component and it can't be called from the Alt - key shortcut.
pndy 8mo ago
It's due to both: the deranged AI push MS did in last 3 years and continuous degradation of their flagship product - Windows, for last 10. I think no other company managed to get a punny nickname due to their questionable pursuits and actions around new trends. Tho most of them were ridiculed in memes and countless critical posts on the Internet when something have surfaced. Also, it appears that Microslop was coined first in 1994, acc. to wikitionary [1] [1] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Microslop https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Microslop

CrazyStat 8mo ago

This site is extremely uncomfortable to read on mobile (iOS).

kelvinjps10 8mo ago
+2 android
Jgrubb 8mo ago
The "hide distracting items" option is the best thing Apple has done lately. Unfortunately there's not anything worth your time once you get that nav out of the way.
znort_ 8mo ago
it also contains no "manifesto" ... -tracker, -alert or -status would be more proper titles.

Retr0id 8mo ago

The irony is that this site is clearly vibecoded, especially the https://status.microslop.com/ https://status.microslop.com/ page, which "works" by requesting `https://outlook.office365.com/owa/healthcheck.htm https://outlook.office365.com/owa/healthcheck.htm` which is nonexistent and returns a 500 error but the code doesn't seem to detect that (and I don't think it could even if it wanted to, due to CORS).

zouhair 8mo ago
Isn't that the point? As if Microsoft is the one making it.
- Retr0id 8mo ago
  If that was the point then why not mimic Microsoft's actual design?
  - giancarlostoro 8mo ago
    Isn't the design inspired by Microsoft's Windows 8 flat design?
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - perching_aix 8mo ago
      Would be surprised, looks nothing like it. Certainly not to my eyes anyways.
    - dominicrose 8mo ago
      IMO Windows phone design and Windows 8 Metro were too minimalistic and squared like this, but TBH the current version of Windows has nice design and you can customize the theme and other things. The issue with Windows now is the unjustified delays and bugs. I think professional PCs suffer the most from bugs because my own PC works fine. Not sure it's completely Microsoft's fault, could be the company. Sometimes the problem can also be the hardware and it's also not completely MS at fault since many manufacturers can produce PC and at widely varying prices.

belabartok39 8mo ago

Irony is that this site itself is text-book, generated slop.

leshenka 8mo ago

At least they're being honest about the counter in their source: // Starting value (high number to suggest ongoing problem) let currentCount = 8_472_000;

gordonhart 8mo ago
This comment was almost certainly written by an LLM.
xnorswap 8mo ago
I recognise Claude's voice in that when I see it.
Lerc 8mo ago
It has that AI referring to a point in the conversation feel about it too. This site would be a particularly interesting example to see the conversation that generated it. There was a case locally where a political party copped flack for using AI generated images of minorities implying that the people in the picture supported their policies. I didn't think the use of AI was terribly significant when it came to the output because, before AI, they would have just hired some actors for the photos and achieved much the same effect. The thing that I did think was significant was, in creating the images, they must have committed to writing exactly what it is that they wanted an image of. I really wished that journalists asked for that text, and then challenged the inevitable refusal.
- WillAdams 8mo ago
  I believe that a lot of the problems with LLMs would be greatly ameliorated if every generated image had embedded in the metadata the prompt and by default, the user credentials (which could be turned off for folks who want privacy).
clearleaf 8mo ago
What am I even supposed to think "gallons of slop" means? Funny that this is both fake and meaningless. OP if you're reading this, this garbage was the worst possible way you could have made the point.

mpalmer 8mo ago

I do not care how good your point is, even satirical, noble-minded slop is a waste of our collective time and energy.

phaser 8mo ago

Is Microsoft the really the main force drowning the internet in slop? I appreciate the discussion on the subject but why is it so specific on Microsoft and the userbase of Bing? It’s funny because I wanted to register this domain for the lulz 3 months ago (Microslop is a fictional company in my videogame Microlandia) but the price was ~15k so i settled for the cheaper microslop.net Whoever wants to get the message across has certainly big motivations ;)

giancarlostoro 8mo ago
> Whoever wants to get the message across has certainly big motivations ;) Could be they are renting the domain instead for a fraction of the cost.

TechSquidTV 8mo ago

"Clawdbot, make me a website about how evil AI is. And make it snappy!"

wonsukchoi97 8mo ago

what's the point of this site?

blitzar 8mo ago
Streisand effect > Microsoft bans the word "Microslop" on its Discord, then locks the server. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216047

gary17the 8mo ago

The Microslop Manifesto hitting the front page of Hacker News and Anthropic Claude servers showing "Partial Outage" at exactly the same time - a coincidence? "I think not."

muzani 8mo ago
Long live the revolution
- DonHopkins 8mo ago
  The revolution will be tokenized.
  - blitzar 8mo ago
    Finally a use for blockchain.
dominicrose 8mo ago
Is it a coincidence that Trump ordered government agencies not to use Anthropic?

oersted 8mo ago

The site itself it's quite the slopfest too! There's no manifesto ("manifest"??), the counter is completely fake, and the tracker doesn't show any of the user submitted reports. There's nothing here other than: "Microsoft is integrating AI into their products and I don't like it, build a website about it please". It barely even has anything to do with Microsoft, it's more of a shallow "AI is bad" take. Is this meant to be satire? It's rather in bad taste if you ask me, I have no idea how it got so many upvotes.

DonHopkins 8mo ago

Microsoft wants to be a Slopopoly, the single source of slop.

piker 8mo ago

Flagged this. As much as I also love to dunk on Microsoft, this kind of crapware is not the way to do it. [I personally] don’t want this on the front page. [And I think others should join me in that belief. Let’s try to keep it a place for interesting things that took some effort.] [edited based on feedback.]

callamdelaney 8mo ago
we do
- piker 8mo ago
  Then can you take yourselves back to Reddit or something? This used to be an interesting place to visit that was differentiated from other “hot take” havens on the net.
  - fuzzfactor 8mo ago
    Well, when a good faith [0] submission from a respectable unaffiliated developer is disparaged on a place like reddit by some heavy-handed action, a natural reaction can be something like "Who died and made you bhagwan?" Now that you mention it, the similarity is more obvious than I thought. [0] OK, moderate faith, "there's an LLM involved so it's got to be crapware". Not my downvote btw, never have never will, that's almost as chickenshit as can be. Almost.
    - piker 8mo ago
      I appreciate your ethics. I do not share your views.
      - fuzzfactor 8mo ago
        I appreciate effort to make this a better place, I just would rather do it with upvotes more than anything else. I don't prefer slop at all, plus people already know Microsoft has declined more in one recent year than any other, and this Microslop site is kind of a lame response, but it did draw some worthwhile comments. This is the kind of thing that has been on peoples' minds so that's what comes out. I don't think it's gostsamo promoting his own work, just something he ran across that emphasizes how bad it could get or maybe how bad it already is in some quarters. Pure slop really and it's bound to get the strongest reaction, but quite interesting when plenty of 90% slop is passing under the radar quite regularly.

mx_03 8mo ago

There was this old hispanic site called mocosoft (moco translates to booger) that was succesfully sued by Microsoft due to a very similar name. Or at least the mocosoft owener received a ceise and desist by Microsoft and decided to drop the site. I expect something similar with this site

mittermayr 8mo ago

Attention, attention, and more attention. That's what that is. First it was crypto, now it's things like this, literal slop that helps absolutely nobody, doing the very thing it claims needs to be stopped: polluting the internet. I get it, everyone wants attention, but figure out a better way, do it right. Also, "Microslop is a satirical mirror" seems like some heavy lifting on overselling the message here. People need to stop pooping in the pool, so, to bring awareness to this, I will now poop in the pool.

pancsta 8mo ago

You should unslop your scroll, whats your strategy to fix half my viewport? I’ll tell you what it is - SLOP ;)

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

rekabis 8mo ago

Personal fresh-setup first steps: • StartAllBack heavily modified for WinXP look-and-feel • Win10Privacy (yes, it handles Win11), with all Windows Store apps yoinked except for store and media utilities • Raphire/Win11Debloat • builtbybel/WinSlop That alone handles a majority of the rip-and-tear I have to do with a fresh Windows installation. Sure, there is a lot more after that, but these seem to handle at least ⅔ of all the heavy lifting. So honestly, aside from the hour or two it takes to run all of these and confirm everything has been voilently excised, AI isn’t really a high concern for me. Right now my short-term fear surrounds the OOBE blocking of local accounts on Home/Pro outside of domain usage. There are still workarounds, but who knows how long they’ll last. Currently trying to design a truly universal image that can be flashed/imaged such that any typical x64 system can at least boot into the Administrator account so that other local accounts can be made manually.